Strange dream...

Often when I've dreamed, over the years, if "home" is figured in the dream, it's the home of my childhood in Richmond Court, a few blocks away from where I now sit. Though I haven't lived there since my late teens or early 20's - when my parents decided to sell off the condo, get out of debt, and move into an apartment (...whereupon they immediately plunged back into pretty much the same level of debt as before, but now without property) - this doesn't matter; wherever I actually do live at the time, in my dreaming mind, I still live in the room at the top of the stairs at #30, 21555 Dewdney Trunk Road.

Tonight, however, my dream was about my living there, which is a bit unusual. My father was alive. My mother hadn't had a stroke. He in particular played an important part in the early dream, but that part is foggy now - I know we spoke, and he was directing me in some way, telling me what to do. I'm not sure what age I was, but I was remodelling my childhood room to better suit me. Whether it's because I was moving back in or just dissatisfied with the way it was, I don't know, but in particular, I was running out of room for my record collection. I had to alter some old shelves, built into and extending out of the closet - not actually a feature of the room in real life, mind you - to make room for them. My property was piled out in the hall, and I was taking stuff off the shelves prior to re-doing them and junking it - old toys, but also jars of old food (I think), which were thick with bugs that had infested them. I hadn't looked at them for years and they'd gone very wrong in the interim. One jar shattered and I had to scoop up this writhing mass of dirt, speckled with fast-crawling little beetles of some sort. Somewhere in this process, as I scooped the garbage into a plastic bag, a young child, or two young children - or maybe they were the same size as me? - appeared beside me and they were watching me and wanting to talk to me about something significant, some "official" issue or point of order that I now forget... it was something about rules, something that seemed technical and unimportant at the time. I told them in no uncertain terms that they weren't to bother me just then; I had to get these shelves cleaned out - had to even knock a couple out and rearrange them - and since they were wood, I was concerned in particular about the possibility of bedbugs...

Somewhere in the midst of smashing up shelving - it seemed to be cedar - I woke up. I tried to fall back to sleep, but - here's a feature of life in Maple Ridge that wasn't much of an issue living in downtown Vancouver - the singing of songbirds outside my window kept me awake, a periodic whistle interrupting my slumbers. So now it's 6am, and I seem to be up for good...